20130921

the apple incident

When I was just started reading, my father, who is obsessed to practical science, handed me a biography of Isaac Newton. I remember reading that biography over and over again. But it was not when Isaac built the reflecting telescope, or when he observed the spectrum of colors, that fascinated me. It was the apple incident. Upon seeing an apple fall from tree, Isaac Newton began to think about gravitation system. It was an apple, that changed him. Distracted him from life, for a moment there, led him to a place where he should be.Had Isaac not seen the apple, it might have taken hundreds of years to formulate gravitation system.

I believe that life consists of perpetual chain reactions. One event leads to another; the domino effects. Well, everybody may have his own point of view about this mysterious life, but what do we actually know? It is our nescience, our lack of understanding about this phenomenon, that Mitch Albom exploits in his book, The Five People You Meet In Heaven. It's basically a story about Eddie, a protagonist main character, who is killed on his 83rd birthday. When he awakes in another life, in the nothingness, he is taken on a journey to meet five people who explain to him about the meaning of life and how their life intertwined with his in many ways he never expected.

The first people Eddie met was a stranger, a blue-skinned freak show worker named Joseph. He died when Eddie ran across the street as a child: caused to wreck his lent car. From this, Eddie learns his first lesson which is that there are no random events in life and all individuals and experiences are connected in some way.Had little Eddie run the other way, Joseph might have lived a little longer.In a rainy night, someone dropped a huge pin in a backseat of a cab. The unlucky next person, a guy in his late 30s, took the cab and accidentally sat on the pin. He cursed. Why the heck would someone so careless wear a pin this huge? He asked the driver to take him to the nearest hospital. He has been waiting for ten minutes, felt like forever, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Turned out it was a woman, also in her late 30s, who used to be his high school sweetheart. They talked, and talked, and talked. Two years later, they got married. Had he not injured, maybe he wouldn't have met love of her life.This apple incident, is what Mitch Albom use to connect Eddie's stories; that was told by five different people, one by one. The apple itself acts like a needle knitting tangled wool into a shawl of life, that belongs to Eddie. To Isaac Newton. To the pin guy. To us.We can only say that everything happens for a reason. When will we know the reason behind all these chains of events? Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe at the ending.P.S. Thankyou Ayla for lending me this book.